Rails Rumble Gems

21 Oct 2012

Rails Rumble has finished and the winner has already been announced. Most of the entries made us flummoxed on how these contestant could develop such a polished application. So I take some pride to dissect what are some of the interesting gems used by the contestants.

Assets

• quiet_assets - Suppress assets log
• sprite-factory - Convert images in stylesheet to sprite

Views

• nestive - Improved layout rendering (still a proof of concept)
• simple_form - DSL form builder (like Formtastic but no opinion markup)
• stamp - Date and time formatting with human-friendly example
• chronic - Natural language time parser
• mobylette - Serve mobile view

Rails

• validates_email - ActiveRecord email validation
• timeline_fu - Github style timeline
• brakeman - Rails security scanner
• rails_config - Configuration for different environment

Services

• honeybadger - Error management service
• exceptional - Error logging
• intercom - User data
• octokit - Github API wrapper

Server

• dragonfly - Rack files handling/uploading
• guard - Event listener for file modification

Database

• texticle - Full text search for PostgreSQL

Render Transactional Email in Browser

08 Oct 2012

If you have something like this in routes.rb

match "emails/:email_file" => "emails#show"

Then in the emails controller, you can do like so:

def show
  render params[:email_file], layout: "mailer"
end

This way, you can view how any transactional email look in the browser. Of course, to really test any HTML email, you need to do the inbox test.

Resolution

01 Jan 2012

This year, I determined to get serious in programming. I love doing and maintaining things. With my current capability as Front-end Developer, it was somehow limited to merely interfaces and interactions.

There’s not many people in this world that could cross both worlds. To be able to do things as you will, would open up a lot of potential. You can take your own career path, be independent, be productive, and probably you could do more traveling.

So, here’s my resolution for 2012:

1. Be independent in Ruby, subsequently Ruby on Rails.
2. Deep understanding in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.
3. Learn new programming languages (Python, Objective C)
4. Launch at least three good personal projects.
5. Create first marketable iOS App.
6. Lean body. BMI > 25.
7. Be Money-problem Free (go ahead, BFM, that’s a good one).

Well, the last two isn’t related to programming. Nevertheless, it’s a worthy point to have in concurrent to the rest of the point.